Ideas - Polarizing Times Call for Nietzsche’s Practice of 'Passing By'

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a method that can help us navigate the highly polarizing discourse that’s afflicting democracies today. IDEAS explores lessons on healthy discourse from a man most popularly associated with nihilism. 

I'm David Rigeon, host of the award-winning podcast Someone Knows Something. Each season I investigate a different unsolved case, from a mysterious bomb hidden in a flashlight to two teenagers killed by the KKK. The New York Times calls SKS a consistently rigorous, intelligent gem, and Esquire named the series one of the best true crime podcasts of 2021. Find someone knows something wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

She's a crooked person. She's a bad person. Evil. She's an evil, sick, crazy. But in two days, we are going to take out the trash in Washington, D.C. and the trash's name is Kamala Harris. One could say that the quality of political discourse is lacking. There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization is seen as unconscionable.

To no one's surprise, polarization was crowned Word of the Year in 2024. As snippy social media memes, distorted analogies, and viral videos throw fat on the fire, perhaps it's time to consider a different approach. I want us to reconsider what we think we're doing and achieving when we're engaging and participating in really sort of confrontational dialogue and critique. Shalini Satkunanandan is a political theorist at University of California Davis. She turns to what at first glance might seem an unlikely source for inspiration. A philosopher popularly known as a polarizing figure,

19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. There is a practice available to us that involves really minimizing unnecessary engagement. And this is a practice I call passing by. It's a practice I get from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And there's a really key line in the book that reads, where one can no longer love, there one should pass by. Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by. Nietzsche and the art of passing by with Ideas producer Nicola Lukzic. I first met Shalini a couple weeks after the 2024 US election, when about half of American

voters were still reeling from the result after such a highly divisive and antagonistic campaign. I asked her what she means by that phrase, passing by. I think it's about making us more hesitant about engagement and dialogue and sort of agonistic contest. It is suggesting, you know, the option is always available not to engage, not to contest. And before every engagement, it's worthwhile asking what its effects are going to be. And I don't know if we always ask that because we almost see engagement as a good in itself and as a sign of caring about shared life.

But I think sometimes caring about shared life means that you engage less. But one thing I will say is that passing by is not disengagement because it's still consonant with caring for shared life. But I describe it as coming close and then veering away. You are paying attention, but you're being extremely hesitant and minimalistic about direct participation. And I think one of the reasons we don't really recognize this as a legitimate tactic is because it's really easy to misread it as kind of resignation or giving up or being lazy or apathetic. And I'm really just trying to say, you know what, veering away is not necessarily giving up or being apathetic or kind of just resigning yourself to the situation.

Right. So an example of that would be say somebody is restating some conspiracy theory or saying that actually Trump won the election in 2020. Our instinct is to be like, no, no, he did not. And here are all the reasons why. And our hope is that the logic and articulating the reason will change the other person. And you're saying that kind of engagement doesn't necessarily work. Right. I think it's actually really important to name untruths. So it's not that I don't think it's important to call out a conspiracy theory for what it is. However, I do think we engage way beyond naming untruths as untruths. And

I think we need to think about what that other kind of engagement is doing. So what is it doing? Participation may actually, for example, aggravate a particular passion situation. So, you know, there's a lot of talk in the United States right now about the resentments that have accumulated on all sides and how we have this politics of resentment right now. And I think it is the case that certain kinds of engagement actually intensify resentment. So passing by can be a way of like mitigating resentments. And I think also sort of more positively, when you pass by, it's almost like you're making it possible that you might sort of tap into or come to new languages for engaging

with other people, new languages for describing the world. It's almost like when you're constantly participating, you're always speaking to other people within received frames and received ways of seeing the world. And I think part of what Nietzsche is trying to get at with passing by is that if you really want to fundamentally change what people care about, what gives their lives meaning, and he calls these values. If you want to really change the ultimate commitments that give meaning to our lives and thereby help transform the world, you need to be really careful about constant participation in public debate because you become incapable of speaking in terms other than the terms of received public debate.

And really creating new values requires you to give yourself the opportunity to sort of come to new ways of speaking and being in the world. Friedrich Nietzsche had the long view. He famously or infamously proclaimed, at a time when it was highly unpopular to do so, that God is dead. God is dead. God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him. Nietzsche basically thought that humankind would be better off working with what surrounds us here on earth,

rather than go looking for meaning and moral codes from some invisible being in the heavens. Stay loyal to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. May your bestowing love and your knowledge serve towards the meaning of the earth. One of his most influential works is a work of fiction that explores his core philosophical tenets through the journeys of a wandering prophet, Zarathustra. When Zarathustra was 30 years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude, and he did not wary of it for 10 years. Zarathustra is a kind of prophet philosopher. He begins the book on top of a mountain alone with his trusty animals, the eagle who represents his pride and the serpent who represents his

wisdom. My name is Jeff Church. I'm chair and professor of political science at the University of Houston. Jeffrey Church specializes in continental philosophy and has written a couple of books on Nietzsche. He describes Zarathustra as a kind of Jesus Christ and Socrates synthesis. Zarathustra acts much like Jesus in the sense that he walks around and offers these short parables and words of wisdom, many of which are specifically pitched against the Christian kind of message. So he's meant to kind of be a replacement for Jesus, but he's also a kind of philosophical figure. So he's not simply a religious figure, he's not simply a prophet, but he's a kind of philosophical figure in that many of his speeches involve a kind of philosophical sensibility and philosophical argumentation. And so in this way, he's a little bit like Socrates. So he walks around and he finds

young people to talk to and to be much like Socrates does to engage in a kind of philosophical conversation with. And so at the end of the day, you know, Nietzsche uses this figure of Zarathustra, much like Plato used this figure of Socrates to try to develop a whole new way of thinking and doing philosophy. So the book opens with Zarathustra coming down from the mountaintop to let humankind know that we should be more focused on accepting the world as it is, rather than keep wasting energy and emotion within the constraints of conventional Christian morality. The values of Christian morality, they're still sort of hanging around, but they're not really

decisive for how we live our lives anymore. But at the same time, their legacy, which led us to focus on the kingdom of heaven beyond this world, rather than this world, has ultimately led us to sort of devalue our life in this world. It's led us to devalue the fact that we are embodied, passionate beings with instincts and drives, that we live in time. And it's taught us to sort of value a disembodied eternal existence beyond this world, and to put all meaning in the kingdom of heaven. But now with our increasingly exact standards of scientific

truth, it's actually really hard to believe in a world beyond. So we've sort of given up on that, but we're still left with the fact that we don't really see meaning in our this worldly existence. A light has dawned for me. I need companions to lure many away from the herd. And so Zarathustra wants to find collaborators, other human beings who have noticed this problem and sensed this problem, this absence of meaning deeply, and he wants to have them help him create new values that

affirm this world, affirm this existence, give meaning to our suffering in this world, and not just see our suffering as a reason to give up on this world. So that's really what he's trying to do. He's trying to create new values to overturn Christian morality and replace it. To that end, I must descend into the depths. I must go down. I must descend into the depths. I must go down. Behold, this cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again.

Thus began Zarathustra's down-going. So Zarathustra, the Jesus-Socrates combo prophet, leaves his solitude eager to share his big ideas with the world, eager to find people who will hear him out and benefit from his deep analysis and vision. And he then descends from the mountain to find essentially acolytes, but he's repeatedly disappointed throughout the book. But along the way, there are many chapters in which Zarathustra has encounters with different individuals and personalities and offers his wisdom in the form of parables and philosophical aphorisms.

Long story short, after many attempts and many rejections, Zarathustra comes to the conclusion that he won't win people over with storytelling, argument, or dialogue. So he decides to head back up the mountain to find solitude once again. Zerathustra is returning home to his mountain after perambulations throughout the world. And he's returning home out of frustration. And he's returning home out of frustration. Exactly. So he's struggling. He's been struggling to find acolytes. He's been struggling to find even people who will understand him. And he's found kind of failure, at least a lack of satisfaction. And he's realized he actually needs to go back to his solitude,

almost to work on himself. And one of the things he has to work on is that he feels that he's somewhat vengeful towards contemporary humanity. He's so frustrated about the state of things and the inability of even his followers to properly rise to the task of creating new values that he's sort of feeling vengeful. And he realizes he needs to sort of work on that because a key part of his teaching is actually that when we feel

vengeful towards the present and the current situation and the people within it, when we resent the fact that they are, when we aren't able to sort of accept them and in some way wish they weren't there at all because change would be easier. He says that feeling of vengefulness against the present basically prevents you from creating genuinely new values that are an affirmative positive vision of human life. When you're vengeful, you're sort of reactive to the present and the past that bequeaths you the present. And instead of seeing the present past as the raw material for the future, instead of

being able to accept it and seeing the possibilities within it, you sort of rage against it. And that means you're actually unable to take up the present past as the raw material for a new future that's not merely defined in kind of angry opposition to the past. On Zarathustra's way back to his mountain home, he has to pass what's described as the Great City. The doors to this great city are closed, but it's here where he meets his nemesis, someone who really knows how to push Zarathustra's buttons. An individual comes out who's referred to as Zarathustra's ape, a fool, a kind of figure who walks around and pretends that he's Zarathustras hieß, denn er hatte ihm etwas vom Satz und Falderrede abgemerkt

und borgte wohl auch gerne. A foaming fool with outstretched hands leapt towards him and blocked his path. And this was the same fool whom the people called Zarathustras' ape. Because he had learned from him some of the phrasings and cadences of Zarathustra's speaking and also liked to borrow from his some of the phrasings and cadences of Zarathustra speaking and also liked to borrow from his store of wisdom.

The fool spoke thus to Zarathustra. Oh, Zarathustra, this is the great city. Here you have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Why do you want to wade through this mud? Have pity on your feet. Spit on the city gate instead and turn around. Here is hell for hermit's thoughts. Here great thoughts are boiled alive and cooked until they are small.

Here all great feelings rot. Here only tiny rattle-bone feelings are allowed to rattle. Do you not already smell the slaughterhouses and the kitchens of the spirit? Does this town not steam with the rick of slaughtered spirit? Do you not see the souls hanging like limp, dirty rags? And they even make newspapers out of these rags. So he's mocking him? So he's mocking him in part. I think there's also a way in which Zarathustra's ape is meant to be a kind of a reflection of

someone who is meant to show Zarathustra's possible reach in the world, that Zarathustra is making an impact, just the wrong kind of impact. So Zarathustra's ape then goes on to ape some of the main doctrines that Zarathustra has been professing in the earlier parts of the work. And a lot of them have to do with the kind of maladies or pathologies in the modern age, especially around the problems of kind of the slavish commitment to public opinion or to religion and to a kind of commercialism, hedonism. Do you not hear how the spirit here turned into wordplay? It vomits dirty dish-word water, and they even make newspapers out of this dirty dish-word water. They hurry each other, and know not where to.

They beat each other up, and know not why. They jangle with their tin, they jangle with their gold. They are cold, and they seek warmth in distilled liquors. They are overheated and seek coolness in frozen spirits. They are all sick and addicted to public opinion. What's interesting is that the fool is restating Zarathustra's teachings in a very vengeful fashion and the fool is really raging against the city.

Spit on this city of broken down souls and narrow chests, of prying eyes and sticky fingers. On this city of the obtrusive, the insolent, the pencil-and-the-rough-necks, the overheated and ambition-eaten, were everything that is crumbly, corrupted, lusty, dusky, overly mushy, and pussy-festus together confederately. Spit on the great city and turn around. And Zarathustra's response, which might be surprising given that these are kinds of doctrines that he himself has professed, he says, I actually despise the despisers. So this is a kind of despising of Zarathustra's ape. That Zarathustra's ape, the problem with that kind of attitude on Zarathustra's ape, that Zarathustra's ape, the problem with that kind of attitude on

Zarathustra's view is that it sinks down to its level, I guess one could say. Stop at last, cried Zarathustra. Your speech and your ways have nauseated me for a long time already. I despise your despising. Indeed, all your foaming is revenge. You vain fool. I guessed you well. And Zarathustra, he says, indeed all your foaming is revenge.

What power does revenge have over people? Like what, what is the problem with that vengeful sentiment? So if I put the problem in Nietzsche's terms and in Zarathustra's terms, they really see vengefulness as in its essence, the desire to undo the past. It's the desire to undo an injury. So, you know, if you're taking interpersonal revenge on someone, you're really trying to undo the injury that they have done to you. But underlying that, Zarathustra sees a deeper revenge against time. We are powerless against time.

We cannot undo the past. And that deep frustration against time is what drives interpersonal revenge. And so that's the underlying understanding of revenge that Zarathustra has. And the problem with revenge, both this deeper revenge against time and interpersonal revenge is that it really prevents you from accepting the present and the past that gives us the present. And if we can't accept the present past, we can't know it properly, we can't know its possibilities, and so we can't actually take it up in a fulsome manner as the raw material of the future. We can't be creative with it.

Instead, we're going to react against it and rage against it. And so if you're trying to create genuinely new values that aren't just defined in opposition to Christian morality, you actually need to accept in a deep way history and the present that history has given us. You need to accept the present as in some way the starting point for the future in order to come into a more creative relationship with it. So revenge is antithetical to positive new creation. Right. It keeps you stuck in the past. Yes. So to overcome revenge, you kind of have to accept the present in this really fulsome way. I mean, in accepting the present, you're also accepting the past, and you're not raging against the fact that something even happened.

You're accepting it, and then you can try to draw it into a new future. But if you don't have that moment of deep acceptance, you're not going to be able to draw it creatively into a new future. Music You're listening to Ideas. We're a broadcast on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris,

and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. We're also a podcast. Subscribe on Spotify, the CBC News app, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. Now considered one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era, 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was largely unknown during his lifetime. He was only 55 years old when he died in 1900, after a decade of suffering mental breakdown.

His work circulated more and more widely after his death, and elements of his thought were infamously appropriated to support the fascism of Nazi Germany. Elements of his writing that I think especially if they're taken out of context can actually be appealing to certain kinds of far-right movements. And I think that's highly unfortunate because I think he's an extremely complicated thinker, fertile mind. I think he has a lot to offer. People coming to politics from all different angles. And I guess there have been many people whom we might say are on the left side of politics who've also been drawn to Nietzsche. He's been an

inspiration for many counter-cultural movements. He really is someone who, for better and for worse, can provide food for thought and inspiration to a variety of different political and ethical positions. And I think part of what I'm trying to do is almost retrieve a less agonistic, more gentle side of his thought that is sometimes buried. And I think that that is exemplified in Vaspo Zaratustra. You see Davis Professor Shalini Satkonanandan is working on a book based on Nietzsche's idea of passing by. The story picks up at that key moment where Zarathustra is driven to exasperation.

I am nauseated too by this great city and not only by this fool. Here as there nothing can be bettered, nothing can be worsened. Woe to this great city and I wish I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will burn. Where one can no longer love, one should go forward. So Zarathustra said and went forward on the Narn and the big city. Meanwhile, Yifu, I give you this lesson in parting. Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by. What Zarathustra recommends at the end of the work is when you can't love, you just need to pass by.

The German is, for ubegen, that is, literally translated as pass over or pass by it so that you don't engage it. You can pass over it, transcend it, get by it. Yeah, so that's the really key line that comes at the very end of the episode in Thusberg Zarathustra called on passing by the episode in which Zarathustra encounters the fool. And basically, if I can explain it a little bit in terms of Zarathustra's interaction with the fool, he says to the fool, you know, why are you staying here in the city raging against it? In staying here and critiquing the city constantly and directly, you're actually becoming like

the city you're critiquing. By remaining in proximity to it, you are actually becoming like the denizens of the city. Where you can no longer love, there you should pass by. If all you can do is rage reactively, then you need to pass by to physically remove yourself. And if all you can do is react vengefully, you're not going to be able to end in any genuine way, change that situation, right? You can't take it up creatively. So you should at that moment pass by. And it's almost like Zarathustra is saying, you know, you need to relax your will. You can't change this immediately and right now you're just raging against this situation.

So veer away. You've come close, you can't accept it, you can't love it. Now veer away. So what is the inherent value then of veering away? It's almost like this drawing back of the will. You're about to rage against what you cannot love, but then you pull back. And by relaxing the will, you can accept this contemptible situation as a starting point for the future, and you can almost attune yourself to better to its possibilities. Nietzsche would even say you learn to see it more clearly. Like you can't see when you're vengeful,

you can't see the fullness of a situation. And so by coming close, veering away, you're relaxing the will and you're actually allowing yourself to see the situation that you think needs to change more clearly. The feeling of rage has a similar effect to the feeling of pity, according to Nietzsche. When we're constantly engaged in a struggle for revenge, we're constantly engaged in essentially in chaining ourselves to the conditions

of the world around us, to reacting to the conditions of the world around us, and not engaging in creating something new or transcending. This is not to say that Nietzsche wants us to say sort of ignore injustices or ignore problems. It's just there's a certain way in which becoming obsessed with ills or problems in the world can never allow us to be free, the way that we've been describing before. This is connected with this notion of pity, that pity, which is in the German, it's mitleid, that is kind of more like sympathy to Leid and Germanist passion or suffering and mit, is to suffer with someone else alongside them. And so, the problem with pity is that for Nietzsche, again, it drags the onlooker too far down into the mire of the kind of suffering and the ills of the world and is reactive to the problems that we see around

us. And instead, I mean, one doesn't want to call them cold-hearted, Nietzsche, exactly, but we need to find different ways to discharge that kind of emotion that those who are pitied, they are better served if we try to find a broader field of vision to solve these problems in a broader and more creative way. LW He actually sees in many ways pity as related to vengefulness. So sometimes we do feel vengeful towards other people, especially people whom we see as our value opponents or those people who are sort of keeping us in this present terrible situation. And sort of we perform our vengefulness by pitying others, by seeing them as sort of

suffering and not necessarily creative in their thinking or not really even thinking properly at all. If you tend to see the world as filled with sufferers rather than creators, then the possibility of genuine change becomes even more slim. Deep inside Nietzsche's idea of creating space where new values can emerge is a thought experiment, one that has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy. It's called the Eternal Return. The Eternal Return is, or Eternal Recurrence, depending on your translation, is a doctrine

that Zarathustra and Nietzsche also develop as a way to affirm the world at its deepest level, as opposed to seeing some kind of heaven or some kind of transcendent world as the true world. Okay, so seeing the world as it is? Seeing the world as it is, even in all its problems and ills and worries, and indeed affirming the world as it is, even in all its problems and ills and worries, and indeed affirming the world and all its ills and worries and problems.

So the idea, this is the idea of the eternal recurrence following. So, and it's pitched in various ways in several different Nietzsche works, and Nietzsche regarded this as one of his pivotal doctrines. But the idea is, think of this universe as eternally recurring down to every last detail over and over again. So you start with the Big Bang, the Big Bang happens, planets are created, universes are formed, the Earth forms,

the Earth goes through its history, that everything contracts back into a, and then there's a big bang yet again. And so, the universe recurs over and over and over again, and there's nothing you could do to change it. So, if you messed up in some way in your childhood, you're fated to eternally return with that, right? Somebody who's elected to president, you didn't like that, it doesn't matter that person has faded to return as president again and again, indeed infinitely. And so from Nietzsche's point of view, I mean, this is why it's helpful, from that perspective, there's a tendency to see that as a tremendous tragedy, right? If this person is gonna be present infinitely over and over again, I do not like this world.

Nietzsche by contrast sees this a great opportunity to affirm the world, because not only are the ills or the problems of the world going to recur infinitely, all the joys and possibilities of the world are going to recur infinitely. All the joys and possibilities of the world are going to recur infinitely. That's the essence of the eternal return, that it gives us the opportunity to affirm this world, even down to its great minute details,

even down to its great flaws, but also to its great joys and successes. Can we relate this to passing by in that great flaws, but also to its great joys and successes. Can we relate this to passing by in that the goal is to create a world that is more pleasant to eternally return to? Yes. So if we engage in constant criticism and revenge, you're going to make the world a little less pleasant place to live in, a little less joyous.

It's going to be more difficult to affirm eternally. So instead what we do is we engage in passing by and give an opportunity to create that open creative space where we can have opportunities for something new and something distinctive and something original that then can be affirmed eternally. Right. And so ultimately, our behavior in the moment is what is the behavior or the effect of what would happen in that eternal return. Is that right? Exactly. And that's often how he describes it is think of this moment, right? This moment,

indeed every moment, is going to be a moment that's going to occur eternally. So when you're making your decision, know that what you're going to say and what you're going to do, you're going to have to live over and over and over and over again forever. Uh, and so, yeah. So what are you going to choose in that moment? Are you going to choose to spout lies or to criticize or to bring, you know, argue with someone, or are you going to choose to pass by and engage in something that's more distinctively you, more distinctively creative?

If transcending resentment is key to new values creation, it's likely Nietzsche wouldn't place much hope in present day political discourse. I'm guessing Nietzsche would have a problem with the two party system you have going in the United States right now. What would he say if he was looking at your country right now, do you think? Yeah, that's great. I mean, cause it's a really good question because it brings together both the pity and the revenge that we're talking about. Cause both within the party, there's a lot of pity for fellow members and between the parties

there's a lot of revenge taking that takes place, right? So that... So break that down for me. Sure, sure. Yeah. So in part, what generates a kind of fellow feeling or attachment among the parties today in the United States is a kind of, it's called negative partisanship, a kind of view that the other side is a threat to the nation's wellbeing, that we think of the other side as either fascists or communists or so forth, we call them names and then we vote for our side even if we don't even like the leader on our side. We nevertheless vote for them. We go out and support them and so forth.

So it's exactly what Nietzsche sort of predicts about the modern world, the ways in which our reactive attitude towards the other side is what drives us in our own positive views or positive beliefs. So here's a case in which negative polarizations or negative attitudes are what are arousing and directing us towards our own particular vote rather than our own understanding about the positive way or the direction of the country. The Trump phenomenon is a tremendous phenomenon, the way in which this man Donald Trump can sort of colonize the consciousness of those who are opposed to him, because those opposed to him understand

themselves in large part and understand their activity in the 21st century in large part as a way to unseat him, as a way to reject or critique his approach and his beliefs. And so that sort of revenge, I think, animates the sort of relationship between the two sides. And then there's an element of pity that is a suffering with one's fellow members. When one gets together, one's fellow co-partisans get together, there's constant efforts to demonize the other side with one another and to trade stories about how terrible the other team is, how dare they do that. So there's both a homogenization So, you know, there's both a homogenization effect that goes on in the parties themselves, and also an effect of distinguishing the parties from one another at the same time. And going back to the pity and revenge that seems to be very much part of the current political

discourse, do you think Nietzsche would be looking at the situation and thinking, ah, case in point, this is where America's at right now? Yes, no, absolutely. I think that Nietzsche would regard the most recent elections, for example, as examples of a kind of vituperation that is very unhealthy if the end goal is a goal towards a kind of liberation of the mind and a liberation of our creativity because there's very little creativity and very little liberation of the mind that goes on and in the kind of political discourse that we say.

on in the kind of political discourse that we see. Mm-hmm. And in a very practical way, if somebody were listening to this and trying to understand this idea of passing by, is there a way to apply it to, you know, regular interactions you might have in a day-to-day life? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a great question. I think the advice is something like don't let every little slight or problem get to you. Right?

So it's almost stoic a bit, is it? Like just rise above the emotional impulse? Right, I think, yes. I think it does have that resonance. I think he, so Nicha does have that intellectual heritage. But I think it's, you know, the attitude is not, I think, one that sometimes you get or the advice that you sometimes get on a kind of news cleanse, right? So just like don't, you know, just delete all the news apps off your phone. That's because the problem with that is, you know, the reason why that's not, that's unnichean is that Zarathustra still does travel the world. I mean, he's not staying up in his mountain with

his eagle and his serpent. He still travels the world. He still learns about the world. So it's still important to stay engaged and it's still important to learn about the world. But yes, sort of adopting more of an attitude of letting things slide off your back, not letting them get to you. I know that's difficult, that's a difficult kind of advice, but I think that what Nietzsche is suggesting here is that the rewards of doing so are pretty great, which is that if you allow things not to sort of get to you, if you pass over or transcend a lot of the minor ills or minor problems that you see,

it allows you to get a kind of the minor ills or minor problems that you see. It allows you to get a kind of intellectual space and a moral space where you can be free, where you're indeed not obsessed with every cabinet pick that Trump is making today, right? That you can, in fact, free that space of your mind where you're obsessed with all those names and in fact, devote that space and time to something that's distinctively for you. And that's distinctively an expression of who you are rather

than a reaction to someone else. Maybe political discourse might be improved if we were just way more cautious about it and if we reacted less and maybe, you know, that can't get rid of resentments in politics, but maybe it won't inflame them as much. Maybe it would reduce them a little bit. Um, and I think it's, it's surely true that, um that we could all stand to be a little bit more hesitant about every engagement and actually pause before every engagement and see what its ramifications are including for the communal, passional reservoir that maybe we should actually start

caring about that and not just thinking about the sort of epistemic effects of our speech, but also really being careful about the passion effects of our speech. So in that sense, yeah, I think maybe it's worth thinking about passing by as a more everyday practice around political engagement and conversation. And you say communal, passion reservoir. What. What do you mean by that? Yeah, it's sort of a term that I think I have sort of, I guess, coined because it helps me understand the practice of passing by and what Zarathustra is up to. Sort of this idea that there's sort of like a common reservoir of passions that are kind of present in shared

life. And sometimes that reservoir can sort of be flooded with problematic passions like revenge. And we as individuals also kind of have individual passion reservoirs within us that are connected to the communal passion reservoir. Part of the problem is that certain kinds of engagements spoil the communal passion reservoir and also leave our own individual passional reservoirs vulnerable to also being spoiled because our individual passional reservoirs partake of the communal passional reservoir. And you know, as I've mentioned, that's super important for Zarathustra's understanding

of new values creation because he understands values themselves as arising from a kind of rank order of passions within our own bodies. So our values are actually a reflection of the passions we've prioritized in our bodies. And so when we're in mainstream milieu, we're constantly having the passion order within our bodies affected by the communal passion reservoir. So, and so if you want to in some way undo the current rank order of passions in your body, you need to actually move your body out of the mainstream spaces that are constantly re-inscribing the rank order of passions contained in reigning values on your body.

Right. And so to bring it to a very real 21st century context in the moment, what would this look like? One thing is giving yourself permission not to engage, self-permission not to correct opinions you find abhorrent. Obviously in certain public situations or if there are people who are immediately vulnerable to those opinions and would suffer from them in the immediate context, it's okay to engage in some kind of refutational correction, but it's not necessary actually in every circumstance. As often as not going to change the opinion anyway, and it's just going to inflame the

situation. And I don't think that's the same as being complacent or not caring. Even just acknowledging that passing by is a possible way of being in the world that is actually about caring for our shared existence. It's not a giving up on it. That can give you permission to be more hesitant about engagement. And so, yeah, I guess I, I see it that way, but I also think that in so many ways, we already practice passing by in those situations and often multiple

overlapping ongoing acts of passing by is actually how we get on with other people. We don't engage on every issue. We don't correct on every issue. That's how families function. And I think that's completely legitimate. And it doesn't mean that we're dysfunctional. That's what it is to live with difference, I think often is just passing by.

It's not about trying to overcome the difference all the time. And so you mentioned Nietzsche's quite lofty goal of deep value change. It does seem unreachable. How realistic is this vision? I think it in many ways, I mean, it's definitely unreachable in a lifetime. And I think that's part of what Zarathustra the text stands for. how long it takes to develop new values. That it's like a slow generational project that requires cooperation and striving amongst many people and also requires individuals trying to unlearn the languages, passions,

habits of reigning values in their bodies every day. And it's, it does, it almost seems impossible. And so much of Zarathustra's struggle is trying to sustain the effort to create new values while faced with the knowledge that it's going to take generations and there'll be many setbacks and it's not an entirely controllable process and yet to keep striving. And I think one of the things that is helpful is that the very act of passing by, it's just not, it's not just sort of laying the ground for new values in a way. It's, it's also a practice. So you're sort of almost, you could see it as it's a practice in which

you're rehearsing that new life and bringing it into being. You know, if you're learning to live around mainstream milieu and learning to be less defined by and reactive to reigning values, you know, you are slowly bringing about another life. It's very meditative. Like I would, Nietzsche would have been a very good yoga instructor. I think he would not have liked that interpretation. Um, I mean, maybe, you know, to be honest, maybe I am giving this like ultra gentle reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and this practice. You know, Nietzsche is known for valorizing contest and robust engagement.

And that's what a lot of contemporary theorists value in him. But I'm just trying to suggest there's this other kind of quieter, more oblique practice that's less contestatory, that might be worth paying some attention to, even if it's just to add it to our practical repertoire of life and of value change. I think the most important thing to take away here is that the world, even if it's a world that appears to be a place that's kind of grim and full of problems and full of anger and injustice, that it still deserves our affirmation because it always contains within it a possibility for something new and something transformative.

You were listening to Nietzsche and the Art of Passing By by Ideas producer Nikola Lukcic. Thank you to our guests. Shailen Iset-Kananandan. I'm from the University of California, Davis. I teach political theory in the political science department. My name is Jeff Church. I'm chair and professor of political science at the University of Houston. Thank you as well to our readers. My name is Thomas Pfanner and I read the part of Nietzsche and Zarathustra.

I'm Gavin Crawford and I read the part of Zarathustra's Pool. Fantastic! It was festering. It was lusty, dusky and overly mushy. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso, Senior Producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer for Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. [♪